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As a podcatcher (among other things), iTunes sucks. Badly. iPodder is nicer, mainly because I can keep my follow list in the cloud at PodNova. However, it (or the combination with podnova) often ends up downloading gigs of old stuff, on some particular feeds. Worse, it consumes obscene quantities of memory and CPU, with its UI being unresponsive to the point of being unusable, like 30 second or more delays for each gesture. This is on an early macbook.

Anyway, I decided to rectify the situation and go back to bashpodder, a tiny shell script which proves the point that a podcatcher need not be grandiose, nor a resource gobbler. It’s also cool as it’s easily customisable for anyone with some bash-fu. I modded it a few years back to keep my follow list in the cloud. (I believe clouds were called “servers” back then.)

I’ve recently modded bashpodder to add files to iTunes. Yes, I still like iTunes and I definitely like the i* players which are, for most intents and purposes, constrained to the universe of iTunes. As for it’s podcatcher, not cool. The interface for exploring podcasts is cumbersome, and the result, the downloaded podcasts, are not handle with care. For example, if you download podcasts with iTunes, it marks them out specially as podcasts, and there’s no way to, say, delete all podcasts older than a week. If they’re normal tracks added from an external catcher, they’re just regular MP3s and you can do what you like with them. And you can’t keep your follow list in the cloud!

So here’s bashpodder modified to add to itunes. (The itunes part I added is the HERE doc section beginning with /usr/bin/osascript. You could easily extend it to, say, tag podcasts from certain feeds with a certain album name.)

Click on “Plain Text” and cut-and-paste it into a shell file. Easiest would be to download the several files required for bashpodder (there should be a mod to make it just a single self-modifying file), and replace bashpodder.shell contents with that below.

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G’Day

Welcome to Michael Mahemoff's blog, soapboxing on software and the web since 2004. I'm presently using HTML5 and the web to make podcasts easier to share, play, and discover at Player FM. I've previously worked at Google and Osmosoft, and built the Ajax Patterns wiki and corresponding book, "Ajax Design Patterns" (O'Reilly 2006).
For avoidance of doubt, I'm not a female, nor ever have been to my knowledge. The title of this blog alludes to English As She Is Spoke, a book so profoundly flawed it reminded me of the maturity of the software industry when this blog began in 2004. I believe the industry has become more sophisticated since then, particularly the importance of UX.
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